The Knight New Challenge, in it’s 5th year, is a very cool effort to fund ideas that mashup aspects of the news industry with new tech. Looking at the winners from the past four years…I think most are more about inspiration than viability, and that’s just fine. Here’s three that stood out to me…MediaBugs.org. The idea is to have a mechanism to allow the ‘crowd’ to report errors in reporting. Cool idea…probably needs a way for a user to trivially report an error while reading from a news site, like nytimes.com, to gain traction.

ushahidi.com. The idea here is a map based system for sharing information in a crisis. Apparently was used following the Haiti earthquake. Very cool!!

documentcloud.org. Idea is to facilate sharing of documents used as sources in news stories. I could imagine this idea could grow into community or algorithmic fact checking.